In article <airliners.1996.2854@ohare.Chicago.COM>,
H Andrew Chuang <Chuanga@cris.com> wrote:
>
>This is a very poor assumption. During the past 25 years, Boeing's
>market share has not changed significantly. McD is the big loser (IMHO,
>Airbus is a major cause, but McD has to take some blames themselves).
>Without Airbus, McD could have launched other projects and offered a
>complete family of planes to compete with Boeing. Without Airbus, even
>Lockheed might have decided to stay in the competition. Although, Boeing
>has the monopoly in the B747 market, the cost per seat of the B747 is
>no more than the cost per seat of the A340. As long as there are more
>than one supplier, the cost of an airplane will be driven by the market
>not by the supplier.
I agree. If Airbus had not come along, McDonnell Douglas
would still be a major player. The airlines would have ordered
aircraft from them, if only to prevent a monopoly. (As it is,
I don't think there is anything wrong with the quality of McDonnell
Douglas' engineering. The problem is that their designs are old.
If they had had the orders and consequently the resources to
update them and/or build all new aircraft.
>
>As I have said many times, I highly regard Airbus's vision of building
>widebody twins. Without Airbus, the B767 and B777 would probably have
>been trijets.
>A3XX. Airbus predicted around 1,500 sales of the over-500-seat market
>to justify the launch of the A3XX, while others (Boeing, BAe, DASA, Rolls,
>GE, P&W, etc.) forecasted a need of 500-800 planes only. The following
>is an example illustrating how bad some market forecasts can be: in 1991,
>right before the launch of the B777, Airbus predicted that there would be:
>
>858 A330s,
>342 A340s,
>550 B777s, and
>450 MD-11s
>
>delivered between 1990 and 2009. I think we can leave the MD-11 alone.
>The B777 (~300) is more than half way there. The A340 (~180) is about
>half way there; but, it seems Airbus will need some miracles to reach its
>A330 (~180) goal.
One slight proviso is that Airbus seems to be doing well with
the A330-200. Here is an aircraft with similar capabilities to the
767-300ER but which is a bit bigger. It may well have a significant
role in routes that are now dominated by the 767, as these markets grow
a bit and require slightly larger aircraft. This factor may encourage
Boeing to build the 767-400ERX (is that the current designation?) some
time soon.
--
Michael Jennings
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
The University of Cambridge. mjj12@damtp.cambridge.ac.uk
"`I need every aluminum can you can find! And duct tape!"